Some board members fear bloat at the top

The Boulder Valley School District's spending on central administration recently came into question during contentious budget discussions.

While the budget for the coming school year was approved as proposed without changes to the number of administrative employees, the board and district officials are developing recommendations for a better budget process with more board discussion earlier and more community feedback.

And at least two board members — Shelly Benford and Tom Miers — plan to continue to lobby the district to look more closely at administrative costs, saying the central administration is growing too fast.

Miers presented a budget document to Superintendent Bruce Messinger that shows 44 central administration positions, compared to about 30 positions in the 2013-14 school year.

His calculations show student enrollment growing by about 5 percent over the last five years, while the number of teachers decreased slightly.

Both he and Benford have said they want to see more resources in the classroom, including reducing class sizes.

"We should be taking more of those people and putting them in the classroom," Miers said during the budget discussions. "The trends are bad."

Messinger said the district looked more closely at its administrative hirings during the budget discussion and found that only a few truly new positions were added in the last few years.

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Those include a director of family partnerships and director of innovations, both to support the district's strategic plan. Then a director level position was added to free up the secondary executive director to work more on supporting schools around the strategic plan.

There's also a new position to manage the district's new data warehouse, which is expected to give educators easier access to student data.

"They're almost entirely related to the goals around our strategic plan," Messinger said.

Other positions aren't new, Messinger said, but were reclassified from "teachers on special assignment" to administrators, such as the gifted and talented director. Some operations employees also moved to the administrative side.

"They're not new people, but have new titles," he said.

Superintendent says district compares well

Some positions also have been eliminated and replaced with a new position or changed with responsibilities reassigned.

For example, Boulder Valley last year didn't fill its deputy superintendent vacancy after Deirdre Pilch was hired as the superintendent in the Greeley-Evans School District. Instead, the district added an assistant superintendent of strategic initiatives position.

When looking at other Front Range peer districts that are similar in size, Messinger said, Boulder Valley appears to spend about the same percentage of its budget on central administration.

"People might package it a little bit differently, but overall it takes a certain amount of staff to get the work done," he said.

Comparing central administration positions and spending across school districts is difficult. Districts use different titles, coordinators versus directors, and assign different job responsibilities to positions with the same titles.

When reporting administration spending to the state, districts include assistant principals and principals. Boulder Valley officials said including school-level administration can skew the numbers because Boulder Valley's schools tend to be smaller, and more schools equal more principals.

But based on comparisons of administrative organizational charts, Boulder Valley — with 31,247 students enrolled — has a larger central administration staff than the neighboring St. Vrain Valley School District — with 31,776 students enrolled.

St. Vrain doesn't have a chief operating officer, while Boulder Valley does. Boulder Valley's chief operating officer position was reinstated about three years ago.

St. Vrain has three assistant superintendents overseeing schools, Boulder Valley has two assistant superintendents overseeing schools plus two executive directors.

St. Vrain also has one executive director of student services, whose job includes special education, and a special education director. Boulder Valley has one special education executive director and four special education directors.

Little change in St. Vrain numbers

St. Vrain Superintendent Don Haddad said he's kept the central administrative staff at largely the same level since he was promoted to superintendent in 2009.

"We have the same number of administrators even as we've added students," he said. "We've just moved some around to meet needs. We've traditionally been leaner than most school districts."

St. Vrain did recently add two administrative positions, executive director of legal and governmental and an executive director of innovation, he said, but both are grant funded.

Eventually, he said, the district likely will need to add more central administrators as it increases the number of schools because of student growth.

But for now, he said, he's more interested in expending the leadership capacity among teachers and principals than in adding more administrators.

"If you have too many layers of administration, it slows progress and productivity," he said. "It takes too much time to provide support for the schools."

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